Apple’s A11 Bionic SoC Development Started When A8 Was Released – Process Started 3 Years Ago

The serious firepower that the A11 Bionic brings to the battlefield can only be summarized as unchallenged. When the benchmarking scores are finally compared, we are certain that there is no chipset that will be able to hold a candle when comparing compute and graphical performance. However, in order to get to this point, Apple did not start with a 12-month period on their hands. The company’s journey started three years ago, during the time when it announced the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which featured an A8 SoC.

A11 Bionic Is Equipped With Apple’s Own Designed Neural Engine and a Second-Generation Performance Controller

In an interview conducted by Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff with Apple’s Phil Schiller, the executive states that when Apple started to develop its own silicon, they always start with three years in mind, which clearly means that the competition is unable to catch up for a couple of generations:

“Srouji told me that when Apple architects silicon, they start by looking three years out, which means the A11 Bionic was under development when Apple was shipping the iPhone 6 and its A8 chip. Back then we weren’t even talking about AI and machine learning at a mobile level and, yet, The neural engine embed, it’s a bet we made three years ahead.”

Apple’s silicon head Johny Srouji said that in order to customize and optimize the ecosystem for millions of users, the integration of own hardware and software was considered paramount:

“This is something we started 10 years ago, designing our own silicon, because that’s the best way to truly customize something that’s uniquely optimized for Apple hardware and software.”

Srouji has been with Apple since the very first iPhone was released back in 2007 and since then, the company has been massively improving the hardware and software space.

As for the A11 Bionic, its dual-core engine recognizes people, places, and objects, and processes machine learning tasks at up to 600 billion operations per second, according to the tech giant.

All three models, the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X are equipped with the 10nm FinFET SoC, breaking through a new echelon in mobile computing and graphical performances.